Sunday Sermon: The Truth Really Might Help Set Us Free

Good morning Everything. We abide in you and serve you. Thank you for another week of life and love. Help us to do your great work, whatever that may be. Amen.

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There is a common notion that religion should not have to undergo reasoned scrutiny; that matters of faith exist somehow detached from matters of evidence and consequence. It's an appalling and dangerous notion. Truth - theological as well as scientific - must be forged and reforged constantly in the crucible of scrutiny, criticism and open, public debate. Only by such constant testing can it maintain any authority, and such authority is only maintained as long as scrutiny and debate may continue. Divine revelation doesn't cut it any more, is what I'm saying.

It wouldn't matter if there weren't stakes I suppose, but at the same time as religion routinely ducks the need to have its tenets properly scrutinised, it controls a lot of the education system, gets involved in politics, demands behaviour of the non-religious, and even goes to war. Meanwhile it avoids taxes. Those who feel all religion should be abolished and repressed are thereby presented with a constant stream of very good arguments.

To seek God is to seek truth. That might be important for us.

For example, despite the beliefs of millions, Jesus is not God. It's not an inconsequential point. God is a big idea, and if you have this sort of thing wrong you're going to have a lot else wrong besides. The nature of Jesus has been the basis of many unnecessary wars already, which seems ironic given his message.

Another consequential example is that Jews are not God's chosen people. There are those who would call such a mundane insight anti-Semitic, but I am merely noting a very obvious archaism.

But that isn't the worst trouble I could get into. Insulting Mohammed is some kind of religious crime, and I admit that I fear stating the very obvious fact that he was not the last prophet. There are parts of the world where this is not considered merely impolite but can get you killed. It must be said that that's wrong. Really, really wrong.

These propositions, in my view, need to be debated fully and publicly, in full view of laity. They can not be allowed to hide behind faith. For let's face this squarely: if any of these propositions are true - that Jesus is God; that Jews are God's chosen people; that Mohammed is the last prophet - then they would be utterly critical for the entire world to know about fully and properly. Priests, Rabbis and Immams, show us! Convince us! The stakes are incredibly high after all.

But if any of these grand religious propositions are not true then, again given the stakes, it is crucial that they be exposed as lies, as currently many millions believe these profound and world-shaking ideas. If they are not correct they are clearly dangerous ideas, after all. They are dividing us terribly for a start.

None of these propositions are essential to their respective religions. All of them, in my view, can be identified together and mutually as idolatry, in the very terms of the respective religions. The monotheistic God is transcendent and nameless after all, eternal, ineffable, beyond human comprehension. That is theology that all three religions share, and it's theology that the House of Every will defend as well. It's also the theology that can unite all of God's people.

The thing is, the societies of the world need their Houses of God - the temples, synagogues, mosques and churches. We need the communities of truth seeking, culture, singing and mutual aid. We need the buildings in their community locations, on real estate which the communities can share and use. We need the direct human contact in helping the poor and forgotten of the community. We need embodiment around our values and our joy of life. Indeed it is my conviction that religion has an enormous role yet to play in the next great age of history. But fearing truth won't help it.

Religion, as society's heart, needs to be able to stand up for truth. Religion must preserve truth when it comes under attack or is repressed. Religion must preserve values in a world of business and power. But religion can't fulfil these functions in society if it fundamentally lacks credibility in the first place. Now, it may be in my madness that I am wrong about one of the propositions I challenged above. But if so let that be revealed through careful, integral enquiry and debate that does not hide behind 'faith'. If religion can not do this it should not speak on any other matter.

And here is the tortured knot in my meditations: society needs religion's voice. Society needs its religions to be the highest, most honestly sought embodiments of truth and values that they can possibly be. Religion is the only institutional layer in society which might do so. The only institution which should be able to be relied upon to have not profit or power at its heart, but the truth.

And there is more to truth than science, history and human nature. Values are much harder than that, and that is where religion must take its great responsibility.

I've used the word 'truth' a lot. It's an unfashionable word in some quarters. I don't mean a fixed item, as some see the Bible or a catechism. I mean the best, most honest, open, professional attempt at truth that we can manage, an ongoing process. I mean an integral engagement with living Logos.

Everything thank you for all Logos. Thank you for all that has been revealed and all that is yet to be revealed. Bless my readers with the capacity to discern truth from falsehood in my words, or in the words of others. So be it.

Sunday Sermon: The Promise of Monotheism

Everything, good morning. Your wonder knows no bounds. Thank you for your earth and sky, for the life you have cultivated and for our mindful existence. Thank you that we are able to see and to love you and one another. It is a great privilege. Amen.

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Monotheism has developed a terrible reputation, and for good reasons. The 'one god' whose narrative begins with Moses has become three monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and between them they have contributed to some of the most horrible oppressions and wars that the world has known. Let's make no mistake about that.

At the same time, 'all people are equal in the sight of God' has been a liberating, empowering phrase for justice and peace throughout history and, in a way, forms the basis of a liberal legal system. Is there hope for this idea, and if so, where did it go wrong?

Let's go back to that Moses story. In the story Moses had led not one but twelve separate peoples out of Egypt. We can see the 'one god' that Moses insisted upon as a political device to unite these twelve tribes, for as long as they had their different gods and beliefs and narratives they would remain divided. This new god, named 'being' (Yaweh) in the language of the Bible, was to replace all of the gods and their names and images, and the story itself, of being led out of Egypt, was to become the single story of all these twelve tribes. As the story itself continues we can be very clear that Yaweh did not bring peace, but it did bring peace between the twelve tribes.

It's not our only example of this device being used to unite disparate peoples. Under Constantine the Roman Empire attempted to institute the Christian god as the single god of the Empire to replace the thousands of cults that previously existed. It appears very unlikely that Constantine himself even cared, but he did care about the unity of the Empire, and that was the point.

When the United States was formed 'under God', the founders had a very similar intent again. To be sure they did not have the Islamic and Buddhist gods in mind but they did have in mind all the many factions of Christianity as well as Judaism. The 'one god' of the early U.S.A. was intentionally not defined any more than that, for if they had defined, say, the Plymouth Brethren god as the god of the new nation, they would never have had the desired unity.

Similarly the Indonesian Constitution laid down in 1945 stipulates that "The state shall be based on the belief in the one and only God." The writers of this constitution were very aware that the Indonesian state was made up of many religions, and once again the stipulation was a deliberate attempt to find a unity of belief as a basis for political unity. Explicitly the 'one god' was not Islamic, Christian or Hindu. The sectarian term 'Allah' (meaning 'the god' in Arabic) which the majority Muslim population wanted in the Constitution was rejected for this reason.

None of these attempts were really successful of course, but in each case (especially the two modern examples) they were far more successful than would have been without them. In each case they left an 'other' outside the new political unit which of course left plenty of room for ongoing strife. In the latter case in particular they also left out the traditional folk religions for whom monotheism was foreign.

The history of expanding monotheism has a parallel history and faces parallel problems as the history of sectionalised humanity. So long as there is an 'us' and a 'them', war and strife exists implicitly even when it is not in open manifestation. We have the irony of pax romana where although Rome is never actually at peace, all the peoples within the Roman Empire are at peace with each other. The hope of many political theorists today is that if the World can finally be politically one, then there is no 'other' left to fight.

It is with this understanding of the political purpose of monotheism that we should approach the original idea of the 'sin of idolatry'. Remember that the Mosaic conception of God was pantheist (Yaweh=being), and hot on the heals of 'there is only one god' are the edicts to never form an image of god and never to name god. We can see why. If God looks like something or has a certain name then every other image or name is implicitly antagonistic to God.

But if God has a 'chosen people' then, whilst those people may find some harmony, they are by definition in antagonism to all others. The origin (by no means an excuse) of anti-semitism, which predates Christianity by centuries and has had repeated, independent emergences throughout Jewish history, is right here, in the Semites' own apparently arrogant claim that they are special in the eyes of the one God. Some may find this controversial but in my mind it's pretty obvious. If God speaks a certain language, or has a special book or a specific cultural narrative, these too are ways to define and limit God. The Bible and the Koran are graven images of God as certainly as any statue, as are holy cities or holy places. The error each time is to limit God by defining what God is, and hence by implication what God is not.

To define God with our puny minds is to insult God, to make a mockery of God, to bring God down to our finite, ever flawed viewpoint.

There is a conception of one God which is equally so for all people, even people we've never met from other planets if they happen to exist, and that is the pantheist conception of God. If God is equivalent to the universe itself, to the totality of all being, then we are all, by definition, under the same god, God's people. This is very important. This is the promise of world peace.

Now, to be sure, even the 10 Commandments do not insist that there are no other gods, but merely that there are no other gods before the One God which is being itself. To be sure, even the most monotheistic religions have had all sorts of superstitions about transcendent beings beneath God, whether they are called 'gods' or not (in the case of Judeo-Christianity: demons, angels, archangels, the Devil, saints etcetera). I want to be very clear that the point is not to denounce every belief as idolatrous (even when we may think they're ridiculous). But all of us, whatever our stories, beliefs and superstitions, are implicitly one under a single totality of being, and this is the only being that I will capitalise, 'God'.

The question remains, why not just abolish all gods? Surely we can be a united humanity if we are all atheists. Yes, possibly, and this is the point where we might agree with the mystic's equation, 1=0, as the actual belief is virtually identical. Indeed there are no 'atheists' when it comes to the pantheist god, but only quibbles about nomenclature, because even atheists believe in our wonderful universe and are obliged to have a relationship with It, and everyone has a relationship with the same, single universe. We may even hear atheists praising the wonder of the cosmos, and how can they not? Meanwhile, as I have spoken of elsewhere, there are real psychological and community needs fulfilled by worship.

We are slowly becoming one people, us humans, and the House of Every seeks to celebrate and promote this unity in a fulsome, sacerdotal way. There is one Everything, with one people, one word and one story. Praise God, for we are one.

Everything, I offer my sermon humbly in your service. Fervently I pray that you not allow my words to deceive any that read here, but that you grant readers critical discernment, that they may in their respective journeys discover only truth and not be misled by my flawed, finite understanding. So be it.

Have a wonderful and wondrous week everyone.